Rohit Ghumare joins Jonathan to discuss his involvement in the DevOps community in India and his role as an organizer for DevOps Days Bangalore. Rohit shares insights into the active DevOps community in India, with regular meetups and conferences happening in different cities. He also provides details about the upcoming DevOps Days India conference, including the preparations and expected number of attendees and speakers. 

Jonathan (00:01.939)

Hello everybody, welcome to another exciting episode of the Adventures in DevOps Podcast. I am your host for the day, Jonathan Hall. Will is out yet again. Will come back, we miss you. But today I'm excited to have our special guest Rohit. Would you tell us about yourself and what you do?

 

Rohit Ghumare (00:19.038)

Yeah, so hello guys. So I am from India. Like I have worked around things around cloud native DevOps and platform engineering kind of thing. So talking about myself, my career started with MLOps kind of role. Then I moved to the DevOps as I DevOps was an interesting part for me in the MLOps. So I ML models, I was like bored training it like weeks and months.

 

That's why I shifted to DevOps and now I'm exploring the kind of a side which is developer advocacy around DevOps companies, cloud native systems, cloud native companies. So yeah, current role. So I recently like I recently left solo. I was working as a platform advocate at solo.io. Now I'm just taking some contract work and looking for some full time roles. But yeah, it is for the future.

 

for now just consulting and stuff so yeah that's all till now and I am the organizer of various communities like Google Developer Groups, AWS user groups, CNCF, Thane KCD Mumbai, Kube and its communities and as well as DevOps India we are organizing around October 20 or something also India is coming with Kube day India so lot of CNCF things and DevOps things I am quite active around

 

Also you can check me on twitter, linkedin, i share the devops resources, i have my own community named devopscommittee.in, i run the cloud native protocol. So i guess thats all introduction about me, sorry if i took too much.

 

Jonathan (01:59.256)

No problem. That's great. It sounds like you're a busy person.

 

Rohit Ghumare (02:03.078)

No, no, not much.

 

Jonathan (02:05.616)

So you're quite involved Okay

 

Sounds like you're quite involved with the community, with DevOps and CNCF and all that sort of stuff. I would be interested in talking to you a little bit about that, but maybe before we do that, I would like to hear a little bit what the community like is there in India. What's the DevOps community like in India? I've never been involved in that. I visited India once about 15 years ago and I had a great time, but it was a very different context.

 

What are the conferences like? What's the community like? The meetups and all that. How active is the community in India around DevOps?

 

Rohit Ghumare (02:45.258)

India community is too much active. If you check for the outside communities also, lot of contributors are from India only. There are lot of people active towards community. Every weekend there is some meetup or some conferences happening in various cities.

 

Rohit Ghumare (03:10.618)

this city as well as some remote cities all cities have some kind of conferences events happening every weekend and devops community is really good not that much big like devtools but yeah like yeah lot of people are talking about devops as well as cloudnative the cncf meetups and that happens like companies which are in the cloudnative system like elastic

 

than similar type of companies, they do their own meetups in various cities.

 

Jonathan (03:47.076)

Really good.

 

Jonathan (03:51.191)

And so you're involved in a bunch of these different organizations and events. And you mentioned DevOps Day, I think, coming up. Did you say October?

 

Rohit Ghumare (03:58.966)

Yeah. Yeah, octopi.

 

Jonathan (04:03.507)

Tell me about your involvement in that. What's your role in DevOps Days and what are the preparations you're making?

 

Rohit Ghumare (04:09.302)

Yeah, so I am the organizer for DevOps Days India which is now named as DevOps Days Bengaluru City name So I am organizer so what work will be like looking for the sponsorships That is the most important thing to do the conference Then reaching to the right audience Then planning the stuff like we have to plan which sponsors to do them as well as

 

which like we have to check CFPs, which like we have to evaluate the CFPs according to what is referred to the DevOps. Is it in our manner like we have maintained the structure like if you are in this observability or security or these DevOps and that kind of you have talk around this kind of things.

 

then only submit and we will review it according to it and if it sounds neutral like vendor neutral and as well as other things then yeah let's then we like review it according to various organizers and after like top rated we will select them as well as there is a planning going on the venue side like managing the money is the most important part right for the conferences.

 

Jonathan (05:02.761)

Mm-hmm.

 

Rohit Ghumare (05:28.066)

So venue and food and like a lot of things, design and as well as screens, booth setups and all. So yeah, discussing the sponsorships is one of the important thing we are doing currently. And yeah, it is doing good, working good. Like just before this call, I was having the DevOps taste India catch up call and all organizers were like very brainstorming the various ideas.

 

Jonathan (05:43.849)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jonathan (05:56.011)

Uh-huh. Is this your first year to do DevOps Days or you've done it before?

 

Rohit Ghumare (06:01.414)

DevOps test this year it is the first one but I have done the Kubernetes community test and CNCF conferences

 

Jonathan (06:15.135)

How many attendees are you expecting for DevOps Days?

 

Jonathan (06:35.099)

I think we froze there for a moment. I asked, sorry, I'll ask again. Maybe you answered, I'm not sure. How many attendees are you expecting there for the DevOps Stages this year?

 

Rohit Ghumare (06:45.002)

Yeah, so it will be around 350 to 500 kind of a range So 500 max we will allow for sure because it is happening in the 5 star hotel and it has limited capacity

 

Jonathan (07:00.491)

course yeah and how many speakers do you have lined up or will you have lined up if it's not done yet

 

Rohit Ghumare (07:06.802)

Yeah, like we have not planned yet, but yeah, like normally it happens around 18 speakers per day. Like normally it happens like that.

 

Jonathan (07:17.28)

Mm-hmm.

 

Rohit Ghumare (07:18.958)

So we have two days conference, so it will be like, in to two.

 

Jonathan (07:22.186)

Nice.

 

Jonathan (07:27.411)

Yeah, that sounds really great. I was at DevOps Days. I've only been to one DevOps Days here in Amsterdam, near where I live. It was probably three or four years ago and it was a really good experience. So, anybody who's listening in the area and...

 

Rohit Ghumare (07:34.187)

Oh.

 

Rohit Ghumare (07:39.486)

I guess that is led by Matt or...

 

Rohit Ghumare (07:45.174)

That is like managed by Matt or Alistair I guess.

 

Jonathan (07:45.423)

Yeah. I want to encourage anybody who's listening.

 

Yes, yes, yes. Sorry, we have some lag. I apologize. We'll edit it out so it sounds good in the final program.

 

Rohit Ghumare (07:56.789)

No problem, yeah.

 

Jonathan (08:01.555)

I just want to encourage anybody who's listening and is in the area to definitely attend DevOps Days or look for one in your area. If you're not in India, they're all over the world, so look for DevOps Days to attend. They're always a good event.

 

Rohit Ghumare (08:14.956)

See ya.

 

Jonathan (08:17.091)

Um...

 

Jonathan (08:21.471)

I'm trying to think what else I want to ask about. So you said this is your first DevOps days, but you've done some Kubernetes related events in the past. How, I'm trying to think what that.

 

Have you always been involved in community organization? Or how did you get, how did, yeah, let me rephrase the question, please edit that out. Now I've thought of the question I wanna ask. How did you get involved in this aspect of community organization with DevOps Days and Kubernetes and other events? What led you to that?

 

Rohit Ghumare (08:56.634)

Okay so to answer that question like it is really interesting question for sure like community was a passion for me from my college period so I started my first community which is named as a keep up which grown around like 22,000 plus members now so it started just by whatsapp group like people were sharing opportunities like trainings internship job offers kind of thing and slowly it grown to like 22,000

 

today on the LinkedIn as well as whatsapp groups and various telegram and stuff. So that's how it was like just a community started not for like community I wanted to build but just normal helping kind of thing. I just wanted to help people in my college and I started it and it grown to various colleges and stuff. Why I stated that thing here because that was the start for my community right.

 

After that, I was working full time in companies for technical roles and then sometime I came to know that there are people who are working really aggressively in the communities, they are building the communities so I came to know about the GDGs, Google Developer Groups then as well as AWS User Groups. So I did the meetups for the AWS User Groups like weekend kind of meetup where people come together 100 or 10 days or something.

 

and then we share the sessions on the AWS as well as cloud and stuff. Right. Then I did the Google developer groups cloud community day then the first for our region, which is Mumbai as well as after that. So how I get involved in this? I was quite active in the open source. I was active in the community side.

 

I was helping the people, I was giving the talks in the conferences, that's how people noticed my work. I was quite active in helping everyone in the organizers who are doing these things so they come to notice like this person and this guy is doing the community work. I was active in the various communities on the Slack, Discord or Whatsapp things.

 

Rohit Ghumare (11:03.386)

And other than that, it was like they just reached out to me like any committee, like would you be interested to work with us like you are doing some work in this thing and would you like to help us in organizing the stuff. That's how I got into the Google Developer Groups than Clouds Mumbai and recently I am appointed as Google Developer Expert for the Google Clouds. So it was amazing journey for me like from being the organizer to now Google Developer

 

It helps a lot in career also as well as you help a lot for the community. There are many times where you have to do the community meetups on your own money and you have to manage your time according to where you want to work or where you are going and stuff.

 

It has its pros and cons but never start a community for monetization or something. It is just like if your goal is to help your audience which can be students, it can be developers, it can be professionals then only do it and you can do it by just joining your regional level communities which are universities. There are lot of communities nowadays right? Code, Code Coffee and so then there is a what we say Code Day then there is a

 

Rohit Ghumare (12:32.096)

There are many languages and communities. You just have to go and talk to the folks there. Lot of people come and share their insights. So that's how they come to know me and that's how I'm being the organizer of various things. So being an organizer is not easy for sure. You have to manage lot of things and it will be really like you will be procrastinate sometimes. But yeah.

 

It is really fun once you have achieved, you have planned this stuff and it was working really nice. So yeah, that really works nice. So yeah, if your goal is to like help everyone and if you want to do it for free, your goal is not to get something out of it, then go ahead. Otherwise, you will be like, I'm just spending my time and I'm not getting any of it.

 

It is never meant to get output for sure. It is just a committee work we say, right? So other than that, if you are if you are developer relations and developer advocate kind of role, then committee helps a lot for you because your goal is to talk to developers and get their insights. If they are using your projects, how they find it kind of thing. So go to the conferences, speak about it to submit the CFP, talk the if you have.

 

If you have the technical knowledge, submit the CIPs and share your guidance to the folks then they will come to you and ask the questions. It is not just for developer relations but any engineering or sales or marketing role if you want to advocate, do it for the open source and vendor neutral kind of talks for sure. Everyone will surely motivate you to do the same. So yeah, that's all I think is important.

 

Jonathan (14:24.715)

That's really cool. I like that you're involved in giving back to the community. That's something that's important to me too. I think that's a good segue though into your podcast. You have a podcast also, which is another way to give back to the community. How long have you been doing your podcast? And tell me about that story.

 

Rohit Ghumare (14:42.142)

Yes, so thing is like I was doing the monthly meetups at my community at CNC of Thane. So I thought like why not to do it virtual also. Right. So I recorded at the start to two, three talks and live in person meetups and uploaded it on YouTube as a three episode. And after that, I invited the folks which are not in India. They're outside. Right.

 

then take name of the Daniel, Abdel or anyone who is outside and doing the awesome work in the communities. I am inviting them talking about the cloud native ecosystem. It can be the projects like Istio project, Kubernetes project, it can be service mesh, then it can be Selium, anything which is around cloud native and DevOps. We talk a lot on the same and as well as like developer advocacy around the cloud native. So it started on just like

 

I never had a goal to create the podcast but it just wanted to do it virtual kind of thing and it helped a lot. Now I am doing every Sunday kind of thing. Meanwhile if I don't upload any Sunday it is like I am not available that Sunday. I am just travelling. So yeah it comes every Sunday for sure. I started it around May or I guess April or May. Then I am doing like every Sunday.

 

trying to upload a video. Recently I uploaded the KCD Mumbai videos also on that same channel and then we linked it to the CNCF for the players so everyone can go to CNCF and watch the videos. So yeah that's all like CloudNed for PortaTas is focused on the CloudNed View and DevOps oriented audience which want to learn and get the guidance from the people who are actually suffered through this journey.

 

and they have the quite knowledge in this tech stack. So anyone can ask the questions in the doubts if they have any. So it helps a lot. Same for the DevOps community, which is like DevOpsCommunity.in. Anyone can go and learn about the DevOps resources. And it's easy to reference.

 

Jonathan (16:58.464)

Really cool.

 

I think it's amazing that we live in a time with video conferencing and podcasts where we can build a network of colleagues and friends and fellow technicians worldwide. This podcast is one way to do that, your podcast. It's really an amazing time to be alive.

 

Rohit Ghumare (17:10.253)

Yeah.

 

Rohit Ghumare (17:16.312)

Yeah.

 

Rohit Ghumare (17:25.006)

yeah and content creators are earning also today alone I released payments to every ex corp twitter content creators everyone is receiving payouts for whatever they did for 3 months so it is amazing, it is revolutionary, something is happening whoever it can be

 

they can be shitposting or they can be sharing quality technical knowledge or any knowledge they are getting payment for it so it is huge right

 

Jonathan (18:03.336)

Yeah.

 

Jonathan (18:09.449)

Yeah, that's definitely true

 

Jonathan (18:14.26)

Let's see, what else should we talk about?

 

Jonathan (18:20.615)

You said you're looking for a contract, is that right?

 

Rohit Ghumare (18:25.318)

contract roles as well as full time roles in the developer relations and developer advocacy

 

Jonathan (18:32.052)

Uh-huh.

 

Jonathan (18:35.655)

Well, let's talk about that briefly. I don't want to spend too much time on that, but what are your, uh, since you're on the show and we're trying to network, uh, maybe somebody out there listening needs exactly your skills. Um, what's your ideal, uh, scenario? What would you love to do?

 

Rohit Ghumare (18:45.678)

short

 

Rohit Ghumare (18:51.038)

Yeah, so like as you heard already like I'm living solo and now I'm looking for the job change. So currently I'm looking for some role which can be like they are around the cloud ecosystem. They're building project around the cloud ecosystem and DevOps and they want someone to advocate that project. They want to connect them to the developer. They want to connect that product to the developers.

 

They want to smooth their developer experience, they want to build some content. It can be in the form of blogs, it can be in the form of technical documentation, white papers or it can be videos. Whatever it can be, I can help them for sure. As well as if they want someone highly active in the communities and sharing knowledge, connecting the folks, showing empathy to all the developers. I am quite active on the twitter, linkedin to share the things, resources with everyone.

 

So yeah, if you are looking for this kind of work, I'm the one of them. And I'm also the Google Developer Expert, as well as AWS Community Builder, as well as running various community greats. So that's kind of ideal job for me, is like it can be in DevOps Cloud already, but developer advocacy platform engineering side.

 

Jonathan (20:11.219)

Great. And so if that sounds like somebody you're looking for, people can reach out to you on LinkedIn or I think I Googled your name and I found you all over the place. So it's not hard to find you. So, so just reach out if you're looking for someone like that.

 

Rohit Ghumare (20:24.355)

Thank you.

 

Jonathan (20:35.087)

Well, let's pause for a moment here. Is there anything else in particular you'd like to talk about with regard to your community Work or anything else and we can talk we can take the conversation that direction

 

Rohit Ghumare (20:47.874)

Sure, let me share something around, like you can ask what you think can be the future of the DevOps or platform engineering or Cloud-Native things, and what new projects are coming in the Cloud-Native system kind of thing, as well as if you want to ask around this developer advocacy rule or something.

 

Jonathan (21:06.515)

All right, that sounds great.

 

Jonathan (21:13.107)

Yeah, great, great. All right, so let's cut back in here.

 

Jonathan (21:18.611)

One of the things we hear a lot about lately, I think, is this discussion about DevOps versus platform engineering. What do you think about this? Are they different things? Are they the same thing? Just tell me what you think. What's your take on that?

 

Rohit Ghumare (21:35.334)

Yeah, so I asked this question a lot to the Google developer advocates as well as a founder of various companies who are building the platforms kind of thing. So this term DevOps is great kind of a term was started by the company which is humanitech and they did the platform engineering gone kind of thing right. So what I think actually platform engineering is something like if you are

 

company if your company is focusing to make the infrastructure and developer platform for it can be IDB or something For the example you can check the backstage project by the Spotify Backstage it can be port or something right that will give you overview of what actually the idle platform can be right So platform engineer work is to build the platform work on the platform engineering for sure devops is never a role

 

It is just started now a days previously also it was never a role DevOps is like culture it comes with a different kind of a set of roles if you are learning the DevOps surely you can go to the platform engineering because entire things comes under the DevOps only then if you are the person who wants to focus on only one of the roles like Go engineer or Rust engineer or Set the labs engineer kind of thing then Kubernetes engineer Kubernetes Operator engineer so you can focus there

 

But platform engineering is something it is like it is never it is not a replacement of DevOps or something DevOps is a culture platform engineering is just a role and yeah sure like if you want to explore that thing there are a lot of people talking about it and nice content they have prepared already. So I would recommend it is not role for sure but yeah platform engineering is something you should explore and where if you want to work around the platforms if you want work around the cloud ecosystem.

 

Jonathan (23:12.127)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jonathan (23:16.06)

I agree.

 

Rohit Ghumare (23:30.914)

then you can create your own platform for sure. All the best for it.

 

Jonathan (23:44.671)

Cool. Yeah, I agree.

 

Jonathan (23:50.591)

DevOps is a lot more, I think it includes platform engineering, but it's much more, like you said, it's the culture and the, just sort of the whole approach.

 

Rohit Ghumare (23:54.078)

Yeah, yeah.

 

Jonathan (24:04.755)

What kinds of new things do you see coming on the horizon? What do you see, let's say in the next 12 months, what do you see coming in the world of DevOps and platform engineering that's exciting to you?

 

Rohit Ghumare (24:18.826)

Yeah, so one of the things which I would recommend everyone to learn, I think it should be learned for sure. Which is like Wasm, Wasm WebAssembly is making impact a lot. Like it is nice technology like many various things which are doing currently in the Kubernetes world, containers world. It is surely getting replaced by the, not replaced but yeah, it can be solved by the Wasm for sure.

 

like docker sounder said like 2 years back solomon hikes he said like if docker like docks if web assembly were exist that time we never will come up with the docker so it is big statement right so web assembly is something you should learn for sure and i recently gave the talk around it on different case studies and it is nice technology for sure if you want to learn so it is nothing but

 

if you are using Photoshop or if you are using web gaming kind of thing like online just going to Google Chrome or Safari and you are running the game site. So how it runs right on the web application on the website directly so that is nothing but the web assembly but it is not just for web it can be for your local system whatever you are running today. So lot of things you can do once you combine like power of the containers and web assembly

 

So surely check it out. So it is one of the things that other thing which is making the buzz all around the world is a ebbf for sure you will agree with that. So ebbf is something like let's example like you were writing the go code JavaScript sorry JavaScript code right then you are writing the programming user level code for sure right but what

 

If I say like you can write the kernel level code directly and it can be user as well as the interface kind of a thing right. So that is nothing but your APPF. So previously you APPF is just extended BPF. So if you are using that PCPDOM command in Linux it is BPF. So where you get the ports and ranges if you are calling to Google Chrome or Google website or any website right. This website only.

 

Rohit Ghumare (26:37.782)

then you will get like status and it is running smoothly and stuff so that is TCBdom right so that extended version of BPPF is EPPF it was coiled recently and when it coiled last year, entire cubecon was just around EPPF not just about Kubernetes right so first time it ever happened everyone was curious about EPPF so EPPF is implemented in lot of projects now

 

It is like Selium and Ground Cover is coming with something. Lot of companies are there. So go ahead and check it out. So EVPF is one of the technology nice for sure. You can do the system call level kernel code directly and lot of things for sure. Currently, people are exploring around C++ and trust for that. That can be future updates for sure.

 

Jonathan (27:27.935)

Very good. I'm curious your thoughts. I've heard some people make the claim, some people even on this show, make the claim that WebAssembly may eventually replace Kubernetes and the whole sort of containerized execution model. I'm curious if you have thoughts on that.